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"I managed to achieve fusion with ice bags taped to my diffusion pump to cool it before January 19th at 3:38pm (my birthday/time)"

http://www.fusor.net/board/vie...

This device is more properly named a Fusor. More at this link The open source fusor research consortium.

There are a lot more than this, but I'll leave these here - not that they are "pure" - some are just teaching existing knowledge and encouraging new people. My "thing" is non-thermal fusion so...the second one of these is my site. http://www.fusor.net/board/ind... - fusor.org, helping beginners, some new science. http://www.coultersmithing.com... My site for a little more advanced user (no, I'm not pimping for members unless you're a super content contributor). Neither accept money or show ads....

Let's just hope that fusion turns out to be really, really hard to achive (meaning ITER), not a table-top experiment.
Or else we are doomed.

You can already build table-top fusion devices.

The tricky bit is to get more energy out than you put in.

A Farnsworth Fusor is a fusion reactor and can be built at home with a little electrical engineering prowess. Someone needs to do some research before making claims that it can't be done. The problem with that device is that the containment is too good. It's not possible to add fuel once the reaction is started and the reaction produces less energy than is required to start it.

If teleportation of protons (ionized hydrogen, not photons) becomes practical, it may achieve breakeven.

Also the man who has so far explained why inertial-confinement fusion can't work. Maybe.

I knew he was involved in medical research, but this is pretty awesome.

But at a few million fusions/second/kilowatt -- good luck making a mole of He of any isotope in your lifetime. For those who don't do chemistry a mole is 6.02 e 23 atoms, more or less, or 22.4 liters of gas at STP. Lessee, 23 - 6 is 17, so roughtly speaking, at current production rates you need say 6 e17 seconds of running to get a mole or so of output gas. call it 1.9 e-10 years per mole, running at a kw input with current tech at its best. As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat.

You can see more about fusors here:

My homepage (we also have a forum linked on the front page, but it's invite-only)

and

The open source fusor forum

We can fuse atoms perfectly well ... we just can't do it efficiently.

Every hospital with advanced medical imaging has a Farnsworth-Hirsh fusor on the premises (most efficient non-weapon neutron producer we know). So technically not only can we fuse atoms perfectly well, we do it on a regular, commercial basis.

And if you want to do it in your own garage

Of course, thanks to the tolerance in academia for differing opinions the only fusion design any academic can work on is the tokamak. It is actually considered a negative that the Z-pinch machine might work, and it is only due to good friends in DoE and Washington that it can get funding. The "scientific consensus" is that no form of inertial confinement will ever work, and that circular devices (like fusors and polywells) also cannot work. Problem is, of course, that both have been demonstrated in actual operation.

The (US) military, by comparison, is sponsoring
-> tokamaks (plural, what you might call "alternative" designs different from ITER)
-> Z-pinch
-> laser inertial confinement fusion
-> polywell
-> acoustic fusion
and apparently 2 other options which are considered sensitive. Academia claim none of these designs will work, but half of them are considered unfeasible because they can't easily fit into the generally used equations for particle movement (e.g. a polywell is specifically designed to create a direct conversion between thermal and magnetic energy, resulting in a potential well. According to academia non-uniform temperature distributions are impossible, and exchanging energy between magnetic fields and temperature is stupid. Therefore "accepted" calculations show that a polywell device cannot produce fusion. There's one tiny issue with these statements : the device does work (even if nowhere as efficient as we would like))

(and yes, I realize that allowing non-uniform temperature distributions in hot gases and-or plasmas is opening up a can of worms the size of which has not been seen since farao's Egypt. But that is is hard (very, very hard) to calculate doesn't mean it can't work)

And if it's true that we have maybe 10-20 years of oil left, we better start sponsoring every last good and bad idea to build a working fusion reactor. Unless, of course, you like living at the luxury level your grandfather's dad lived. You know, without soap or toothpaste for "normal" people. Without cars. Etc.

(and before anyone says it, electric cars are NOT a solution for energy generation. How anyone can be dumb enough to claim this is beyond me, but there's lots of greenies who claim this anyway)

In fact, our open source fusor forum, http://www.fusor.net/board/index.php?site=fusor doesn't even know this guy, or I don't recognize him, anyway -- we usually use our real names there. It's been around for quite awhile too -- if you go there look at the archives and see for yourself. Not only does this represent a dupe, and not to take anything away from this guy, he's far from alone, and unless he is making over 2 million neutrons/second on less than 5w power input, he's not even caught up to the current hobby record, which as far as I know, I hold -- some of it shown at http://www.coultersmithing.com/ , my site (which can take a slashdotting much better than the forum can, which is "some guy" hosting from home -- the perfessor we call him and are grateful. If you go there you'll find many more than 38 folks with working fusors I think. The pic in the BBC article looks in fact like one copied from one of our (main) forum members fusors, Richard Hull (see wikipedia on that). Again, not taking anything away from the guy -- the more the merrier -- hope he catches up with the rest of us at some point, as we have refined the Farnsworth concept quite a bit over the years, and made much more progress than is normally reported, because what funding is done is either to ITER with their non working approach, or NIF, which is really a weapons stewardship test device. Mod me up, damnit -- this is sick, we've been doing this for decades and are pretty good at it, and nearly all of us have done it *purely* with our own earned bucks, not taking contributions from people dumb enough to donate for no return. I guess we mostly care more about the science than being 15-minute famous. And most of us (but not I) have done it for a lot less money than that. We have a few high school students who have made working fusors on high school student spare change kinds of money. I had the bucks, so I went whole hog and do a real science approach myself, but I am the exception, not the rule. Strictly speaking it's against regulations to make a device that makes either X rays or Neutrons without some paperwork, so that's another incorrect statement, and many hobby fusors make amounts that would be dangerous if we weren't careful, and part of what we do on our forum is mention what we have "activated" eg made our own radioisotopes via neutrons from fusors.

I did some EEG work while working on a prosthetic for deaf infants -- how to even tell if it was having any effect? No one had looked into that, it was wide open and easy to make real progress at.

I got a nice telescope and camera setup, and did do some stuff I thought was worthwhile in digital signal processing to get rid of some atmospherics. And it was fun.

Now I work on nuclear fusion full time. Since it's my time, my money, my lab, I can do things no governement or university can, the most important one of which is turn on a dime every time I learn something new. My results are at worst "competitive" with all comers in the particular area I'm working in too -- all that money hasn't bought them much progress as it hasn't been spent wisely.

If in today's science, a lab grunt brought a potential Fleming a contaminated petri dish, they'd get harsh words, a do over if not a reprimand, and we'd not find penicillin.

In today's science, if an apple hits you on the head, you build a roof or move away from the tree, you don't try and figure out why.

Yes, the chances of one person doing something really earth shaking are about like they've always been, but that means -- there's a chance. Einstein was mentioned, but there are many others going back and forward in time from that, quite a few actually, and most of them didn't have the gear I have or can get cheap surplus. What was "rocket science" in the 30's is now around on ebay for pennies.

Think of the greats who would have *killed* to get the scientific gear we can get today for cheap, and how much low hanging fruit there might be as science rushed on to the next sexy thing, leaving behind quite a lot for the button sorter types -- who wouldn't realize something new happening if it killed them.

And here on Slashdot, we can afford to remember that rocket science started in the middle kingdom some thousands of years ago, and I'd bet some of it was done by what we call drunken rednecks today.

It's a matter of perspective.

My site shows some of what I can do -- go ahead and bang on me, my ISP boasts they can take a Slashdotting, lets see if they can. You should be nice to

these guys, as that's a home-class server on a not very fat pipe funded by the guy who shares it with us, but it's a group of pretty smart guys who *are right now* doing things in advance of the big boys. If you are clever, you might not need billions and big buildings to find things out that are useful. So, the word is, go for it.
I had to spend most of a lifetime getting ready -- you know, money, knowledge, experience, equipment, all that mundane crap. But it was worth it for me, and should be to you too.

What? Nobody's mentioned the Farnsworth Fusor yet?

No one yet has developed fusion on Earth that exceeds unity (i.e. more energy out than what you put in), but from the looks of it it seems that the Farnsworth Fusor has as much chance of exceeding unity as all the other huge projects. But the cool thing is the Farnsworth Fusor is very small compared to ITER and the National Ignition Facility or just about any other Tokomak reactor that's being experimented with currently.

Also note that fusion that generates heat which boils water that runs a steam turbine is a grossly inefficient way way to generate energy. Much better is the pB (proton + Boron 11) reaction that generates electrons that can be harvested directly as electricity.

And finally, from TFA, while it is true that the Deuterium-Tritium reaction does not produce neutrons, when you have those materials in a Confined Reaction Fusion, I think it's exceedingly difficult to prevent Deuterium-Deuterium reactions from taking place which DOES produce neutrons (contrary to what TFA states). And the problem with generating neutrons is they bugger up and transmute all your new and shiny pieces and parts into undesirable yucky materials.

BTM

Is what we do on the fusor forum for amateur high energy scientists. It's not perfect, but we basically share in the same manner as open source software all that we do, and it's working fine for us. We help the newbies when we can, or tell them to search the extensive archives for when that question has been asked and answered before, post data, pictures of our gear and all that. It's a good crowd, but a small site, so don't all go there at once....it won't take it and this isn't funded by some large outfit, it's just our own money. Real names are universally used there -- this site is for real work, not kiddie flame wars. There's not much moderation, but jerks lose the ability to log in quickly. Here is the open source fusor forum for you to check out. This is mostly a bunch of old guys having some fun, and helping some new guys get into the game. All sorts of advice and data shared openly and all in one place. Far from perfect, but a good start, I'd say. Check out the "recent threads" link which is as close to slashdot format as it gets on that site.

In the meantime, amateurs build fusion devices in their basements and achieve real measurable D-D fusion:

http://www.fusor.net/

So, they're avoiding the problem of confining the plasma, which clearly is impossible with a 1G K plasma without it being inside a supergiant star. However, Todd Rider's excellent, albeit depressing, papers on this topic seem open and shut on the prospects of generating net power out of a non-equilibrium reactor. Particularly with the p-B reaction, you lose all the net power to brehmstrahllung.

Lerner has done good PR, and I suspect he means well, but he's wasting his time. There isn't a magic reactor, dense or otherwise focused that will evade the physics.

Links to the Rider's papers on this topic at following link.
http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?bn=fusor_future&key=1181660470

In undergrad we spent a few weeks attempting to reproduce Dr. Taleyarkhan work on sonic cavitation experiments in deuterated acetone. While there is much controversy surrounding the this type of fusion, it is an interesting and simple experiment, but hard to get reliable results.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Bubble_fusion

For students it is be exciting to be apart of the human quest for fusion power. And is useful as a teaching tool for all methods of fusion. Taking part in a controversial research project can be very stimulating.

The experiment can be attempted using a pyrex 100mL flask and placed piezoelectric speakers at key locations. The flask is filled with deuterated acetone and the speakers are modulated at different frequencies until cavitation and sonoluminescence is achieved. Their are several types of neutron detectors that can be used. Some of them cheaper than others but less sensitive.

Anyways, just an idea. Alternatively, you can also build a fusor, which is a bit more involved but with the right setup could also work for a short term project, would require you todo some pre-building. http://www.fusor.net/
-alot cheaper than ITER or Lawrence Livermore laser confinement...

I wondered why many fusion drive proposals are the slightly absurd mini-bomb machine gun kind, then realised perhaps it is because the Orion program really was that awesome in a nuclear-steam punk fantasy kind of way. However ludicrous it is to detonate 1000 nuclear warheads sequentially to reach orbit, you had to admit it'd be super-cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) "This extreme design could be built with materials and techniques that could be obtained in 1958 or were anticipated to be available shortly after."

Yet these equivalent fusion-based proposals seem to be only plausible with some assumptions of technological advancement, rather than with assumptions that people wouldn't mind the irreparable damage to the earths biosphere.

I think the approach is all wrong by many proposals so far. Thing is, we can create and contain fusion right now, and you can do it your backyard (no kidding - see lower). I think a plausible fusion drive would be something like a Bussard electrostatic confinement based drive. Essentially you are accelerating ions to high enough velocity for fusion, but allowing some to escape by a neutral charged nozzle.

We don't have fusion reactors right now that break even in any practical generative fashion, however that is absolutely not necessary. Give up the need to generate power from fusion, for example use an existing fission pile to power the thing, and you start to get results. The high-velocity fusion products become a nice boost to your specific impulse, along with your exhaust velocity much higher than any Ion or VASMIR thruster for any high-energy fuel leaking out the rear.

Ditch the perfectionist science and apply practical engineering and tune the thing for efficiency. Go to the stars.

Interestingly, electrostatic inertial confinement in a hard vacuum doesn't even need reactor walls .

What makes this even more exciting is that hobbyists build electrostatic confinement devices, and even get fusion reactions. Oh, OpenSource too.

http://www.fusor.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confinement

Now figure out how to make a drive out of a Fusor, strap some solar cells on it, and convince a private space launch company to put in orbit.

There was an article by Tom Ligon in Analog back in September 1998-- it's available on the web if you're interested in more details.

This is pretty cool. I love amateur science.

With that said, note that there is a vast difference between merely demonstrating fusion, and producing usable power by fusion, roughly similar to the gap between the glow of your old radium watch dial, and a nuclear bomb. But if the hobbiests can learn to scale it up... now, that would be cool.

I was wondering if anyone else caught that fusion stuff.

From here:
"For his doctoral work, Dietrich is researching inertial electrostatic confinement fusion ..."

Okay, he built a fusor. Smart, but other kids have done that too.

"... for spacecraft power and propulsion ..."

Okay, fusion powered spacecraft. You've got my attention now. Go on.

" ... under Dr. Raymond J. Sedwick, a principal research scientist at MIT's Space Systems Lab. This opportunity stemmed from an efficiency improvement design Dietrich patented for a desktop-sized Penning Fusion Reactor ..."

Efficient enough to finally make break even power or better?

"... following a research internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2002. Dietrich credits this internship with sparking his initial curiosity about a distributed network of reactors that could potentially supplant the United States' strained power grid system."

Forget the flying cars, man! Get back on the fusion stuff. We needed that like, yesterday.

Skipping a few steps, you could turn your radium paint into a neutron gun if you so desired. (Lead box with a shutter and aluminum (Or beryllium, like Mr. Boy scout*) You could also build a Farnsworth-Hirsch reactor http://www.fusor.net for a little more money and it would look a lot cooler on your workbench. Both are effective neutron sources.

What made his experience so remarkable was the persistence in acquiring materials. Whereas we would pop onto eBay and order some uranium ore, he spent days looking for radioactive rocks. When that failed he contacted a supplier on the opposite side of the world. The world is a lot smaller place now that it was in the early 90's.

Nope, it appears that it was a false alert. "The contract has merely been continued for a year without funding".

Evidently somebody got carried away with some fairly routine bookkeeping. The contract still exists, and there is still the same un-spent money on the books. Evidently, what happened is a "no-cost extension". That is, the period of the contract has been extended, but they're not sending any checks.

"Evidently somebody got carried away with some fairly routine bookkeeping. The contract still exists, and there is still the same un-spent money on the books. Evidently, what happened is a "no-cost extension". That is, the period of the contract has been extended, but they're not sending any checks."

http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn= fusor_historynews&key=1177038530

Anyone have further information ?

We can't do everything. Especially when there've been gangs of people building these devices in their garages for decades: http://fusor.net/ If he built himself a radio should it be in the news too?

His site: http://fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn=fuso r_images&key=1150855195

Can anyone independently verify that fusion is actually occurring here? Is he really creating Helium in the chamber?

Here are two of Bussards posts, and the two patents he mentions:
http://www.randi.org/forumlive/showpost.php?s=e665 007961e36e93001813d66ec9a4ea&p=1722023
http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn= fusor_announce&key=1143684406
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5160695.PN.&OS=PN/51606 95&RS=PN/5160695
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4826646.PN.&OS=PN/48266 46&RS=PN/4826646

Everything he says is consistent with what he has said elsewhere. Furthermore, all the details are correct to the extent of my knowledge (though this isn't the same branch of physics I specialised in).

The only thing I notice to be a little offsetting is: his disdain for government funding, oil companies, and his exaggeration of how great this will be for the world. But some folks are like that; this is perhaps the sort of thinking you should keep to yourself when trying to convince others of the veracity of your claims! All the same, it has no bearing on the rigour or ration of his work. (He even recognises that this sounds like "sour grapes", but that this isn't his intention.)

So I expect this to be on the up-and-up, though an insurmountable obstacle may well still pop up. That isn't the sort of thing I would expect to be mentioned to potential funders!

On March 29, 2006, Bussard claimed on the fusor.net forum that EMC2 had developed an inertial electrostatic confinement fusion process that was 100,000 times more efficient than previous designs. However, the company's funding ran out, and Bussard is looking for additional funding to develop a full-scale fusion power plant. On June 23, 2006 Bussard provided more details of the breakthrough and the circumstances of the shutdown of this work by the government.

The difficulty with small scale fusion isn't making it happen. That's been done many, many times. The difficulty with small scale fusion (and all fusion) is making it produce power (more power extracted from the reaction than put into the reaction).

That's where Pons and Fleishman got hosed. They claimed a 300% power surplus without experimental verification. This announcement is different from that for several reasons.

1) These guys are specifically not claiming excess power.
2) They're claiming to have lots of high-energy neutrons.
3) This is actually the announcement of a second group of scientists repeating the experiment and successfully verifying the results of the first group.

In short, this announcement is nothing like the cold fusion debacle of the late '80s.

Regards,
Ross

picture here.
It comes from this blog.

Also have a look here: fusor.net

You would be right, if there weren't already other ways of doing fusion without a tokamak or simlar devices.

Philo Farnsworth was doing table top fusion back in the 60's using tube techniques that were part of the outgrowth of his pioneering work in Television.

Check out fusor.net for details on the technique.

Look around on the Net, and you can find more articles on the device in question, including people who have built them to play around with. To the best of my knowledge, there is no practical appliction for a Farnsworth device, except the not-inconsiderable bragging rights that you have built your own fusion reactor (a line sure to have the babes just lining up).

I wonder if you could build a Fusor off of CO2 with a continious feed.. it might not be very efficent (e.g. it will consume a lot of fuel and not produce anything near 100% efficency), but if you have gobs and gobs of CO2 laying around, who cares?

This, though way cool, is actually a totally different kind of fusion.

Research continues on this to this day, mostly by amateur researchers (here's a good link). The general understanding is that you can absolutely produce fusion, you just can't break even in terms of energy.

Try, I don't know, reading the fine article in the story.

Fact is, there are plenty of working fusion reactors.

You could even build one yourself.

We know of one working fusion reaction - the sun. We know of many designs and fuel types we can use for controlling fusion reactions here on Earth, such as Tokamok and Tritium & Dueterium, respectively.

What we don't know is how to construct a reactor that will actually give us a net positive energy gain(i.e. Put out more energy than we put in) so as to effectively replace all those nasty other methods of generating electricity, like coal or fission.

This is why we are still researching new ways of acheiving fusion that could lead to new perspectives or breakthroughs in the field, like the experiment in the, ahem, fine article.

More information, including plans, is available at Fusor.net.

Also, fusion is not the wonderous clean energy source it's made out to be, because any type of fusion that's realistically possible outside of a star also produces neutrons, which activate the reactor materials leading to significant amounts of radioactive waste. That said, the waste problem is not so severe as with fission plants because generally isotopes with short halflifes are produced.

For more information about fusion in general and amateur efforts in particular - I'm building a tabletop reactor - check out http://www.fusor.net/

I'm placing my bets on this guy doing it first or some other amateur tinkerer. I hate to mention the billions of dollars wasted on tokamak "make it bigger and it will work" technology that completely does a reverse 180 from Farnsworth's discovery of potential wells where smaller is better (most people can't vacuum out the inert neutrons quick enough). I'd like to mention that nobody has yet met the fusor challenge, amateur or professional. Produce enough excess energy to light a 60watt lightbulb. I believe there's a million or two dollars out there as a reward if I'm not mistaken.

• Migma fusion
• Inertial electrostatic confinement
• Muon-catalyzed fusion
• Antimatter-catalyzed fusion
• Cold fusion

[Maglich]'s grant-proposal was rejected, not on its technical merits, but because ERDA had already made a policy decision that only the Tokamak and Laser-Inertial-Confinement approaches should be funded. Migma was erroneously classified as a magnetic mirror machine, and ERDA had decided to phase out mirrors. When Maglich tried to appeal this decision, the Gov't-convened Robson commission did a railroad-job on him ( twelve tokamak-experts read twelve prepared negative statements, with no opportunity for rebuttal). A colleague of mine let me read copies of the Robson report and FEC's response; the Robson commission's misunderstanding of the principles behind migma was very distressing...)

• The electrical field voltage,
  
• the size of the containment vessel,
  
• the partial pressure of gas in the vessel,
  
• the total pressure of gas given impurities,
  
• the size and configuration of the screen (charged mesh),
  
• the cycle time (on again, off again),
  
• whether you want the fusion to occurr on the surface of the mesh (it does, and makes it very hot),
  
• the material the mesh is made from,
  
• if you have a mesh to catch the ions and regenerate power,
  
• if the light given off is converted to electricity,
  
• if you're hoping for D-D fusion, D-T fusion, or some wierd Li6 variant.
  

None of these produce any usable power of course.

If you take a look over at fusor.net, there are actually a bunch of us working towards just that. The main problem with the Farnsworth's team later designs is that they require very complex ion guns - the type that uses a gas pressure significantly higher in the guns than in the main chamber they fire into, requiring two sets of vacuum gear and more plumbing. We're still working on homemade ion guns.

Actually, some list members have recently figured out how (in theory) to use something called a wakefield accelerator to get many orders of magnitude more powerful ion guns than anything Farnsworth could ever build, and these toys are buildable by the amateur machinist.

Many list members (including myself, although I still a month or so away from "first plasma" in my first fusor) are building this hardware right now.

FUSor had a college student with his own fusor about 1 and a half years ago. others are listed in their discussion forum.
the inventor of todays tv was, iirc a german named braun and radar? they did during the first world war not doppler of course but a range finder ..
i just hate oold stuff in slashy 8) keep postin anyways :D

I actually read quite a bit on these devices a few weeks ago when the cold fusion article came up on /.
One of the things I came across was Fusor, which is essentially a site for people who do this as a hobby.
The most interesting thing I found was a link to the work of a gentleman named Eric Lerner. He actually has a workable, scalable, power-generating reactor. His is based on "dense plasma focus". Thing is, he's already got the thing to 1 billion degrees - and he's going for the big time - the aneutronic p-B11 reaction. That only generates alpha particles - which can be directly converted into electricity. No nasty turbines or steam! Pretty amazing.

Check out Fusor.net.

A lot of ameteur's have been getting closer to fusion in their homes than the cold fusion people have ever gotten.

Some quick facts:

Science by press release is almost never ever good science.

Big physics has been getting more money than big chemistry. Many chemists jumped on the bandwagon in the hopes of getting research grants in their discipline.

The nature of fusion makes the whole idea of "cold fussion" an oxymoron.

A lot of ameteur's have been getting closer to fusion in their homes than the cold fusion people have ever gotten.

See sig for final thoughts on this subject.

Produces much more fusion neutros for much less money. It is the only fusion technology I know of that has seen deployment outside research labs.

have a look here to build your own.

[imagine a beowulf cluster of these]
--

An answer, should you have bothered to look it up, is here

It doesn't work because Adam Parker didn't win a second place prize (Engineering category) in the Intel Science and Engineering Foundation contest for building one.

And these guys at U Wisconsin are frauds too.

I don't think claiming that it doesn't work is a very logical position. See some of the lists of peer reviewed publications on the subject which have obviously been fairly widely replicated (see for example this link. Clearly, the fact that these systems produce neutrons in substantial quantities seems unassailable - whether the exact results or numbers Hirsch and Meeks reported or claims (billions of neutrons per second or whatever) has been replicated doesn't affect the basic premise.

And of couse, patents be damned - trying to figure fuckall out from any patent is generally a futile exercise as anybody who's tried to do it will tell you.

Also, I remember the result you refer to from my Freshman year E&M class ... that you can't produce a "particle trap" using an electric field alone. I remember similarly to you, that had to do with the fact that a potential well -> non-zero divergence and thus a source of charge... But I certainly don't remember in enough detail to imply that this device (whose existance is clearly admitted to by many real physicists) in any way contradicts Gauss' law. I sincerely doubt if you actually work through solving Poisson's equation in radial coordinates that you will find anything magically contradictory about the existence of this device, since nobody has gone around thumping their chests that Gauss was wrong because IEC is possible.

Now the question of whether these devices will lead to breakeven or better sustained fusion reactions - that's another question entirely, and I'll be damned if any of us know the answer to that one yet.

I read through some of the basic info on the page (before some of it got Slashdotted) and then started reading the forums. That's when I started finding the unfortunate schwag like this thread . The problem with all of these sorts of projects is that they tend to attract nutters who think they've rewritten the laws of physics in their garage from scratch using "maths" that they just can't divulge yet because they don't quite work. Ugh. Free energy weirdos and neuvo-quantum threory weirdos - two of a kind.

Things like this always make me wonder, if an area is so promising, why aren't there any academics out there getting funding to pursue it? I mean, I realize sometimes the academic ESTABLISHMENT can be closeminded, but if something has merit, there are usually a FEW academics who will go out on a limb and pursue it to the point that they demonstrate sufficiently interesting results to build a broader base of interest. I've never honestly heard of massive numbers of academics whole-hog ignoring truly promising areas out of some misguided conspiracy bullshit, and frankly it's quite hard to imagine, since the drive for personal fame and glory usually trumps the desire to avoid stepping on toes and to "toe the line".

It sounds like there is real work yet to be done to get these things close to breakeven, and it probably ain't gonna get done in some garage project, but hey, you never know.

I'd agree - but we're going for "most beautiful". While I'd agree that Trinity has its own sort of beauty, I'd say it falls down on two points:

> > must not be too complicated or expensive, and, most importantly, be within the reach of students

Even if it's within the reach of your students, it's disqualified on the grounds that it's (a) very complicated, and (b) even more expensive. Not just to build it, but to clean up after it. Building a new city to house the rebuilt university to house the rebuilt lab can get pricy, y'know.

On the other hand, I suppose there are physics "students" working on this problem in Baghdad at the moment, and I happen to think that Baghdad is in rather desperate need of, uh, "urban renewal"... it'd look way cool on CNN if one of those were to go off in a Baghdad basement, remind the rest of the world that Some Things Are Not To Be Fucked With By People Who Don't Know What They're Doing, and simultaneously qualify as the Greatest Darwin Award in human history. I could live with that. ('Specially as I'm not downwind :)

> until a hole is successfully opened in the spacetime, splitting the atom is the greatest scientific achievement ever.

...well, greatest Darwin Award until then, at any rate :) Schluuuuuuuuuuur*poof*

So I'll one-up your fission experiment with a (Farnsworth Fusor. It's relatively safe to build, fuses hydrogen, emits detectable neutrons to confirm that you've got real, honest-to-God fusion, and looks way cool.

(Don't expect to get breakeven with it - it's orders of magnitude too inefficient. It's just... well... kinda neat.)

For extra safety or regulatory compliance, your students can build and run it with H2 instead of deuterium and it'll look just as cool without any emissions at all. (And it'll be just about as far from breaking even either way ;-)

In short, the Farnsworth Fusor is rather like his other big invention (a little thing called "television", which you may have heard of) -- both inventions consume more energy than they produce, neither serves any useful function, and both look pretty cool anyway :)

Tabletop fusion has been around for 50 years:

Fusor.net